When Charles Brown enrolled as a freshman four years ago, he had no idea Beach was one of the nation’s first public high schools for African-Americans or that it had produced doctors, lawyers, mayors and celebrated business leaders over the course of its 146-year history.

He just knew the odds were hard at work against Alfred Ely Beach High School and it seemed to be wearing everyone down.

“It was always tense, chaotic,” he said. “It seemed like there was always someone acting out because the administration was so strict. And administrators always seemed to be cracking down because they were under so much pressure to turn things around.”

Then in 2010, as campus tension, bad publicity and academic disappointments peaked, hope was restored through lot of hard work, dynamic leadership and a radical education reform grant from President Barack Obama’s administration.

“Everything changed my sophomore year,” Brown said. “It was like everyone was energized overnight and they had all this new motivation to make students at Beach High the best they could be. It was something the students really needed. It made all of us want to do better. We hit the ground running like nothing could stop us.”

Hope

Beach High was listed as one of the worst schools in the state of Georgia when Daniel Bonnell took a teaching job there in 2008. He was an artist from Hilton Head Island, S.C., and his sole purpose in taking the inner-city teaching job was to get health benefits while his wife battled cancer.

His first day was an emotionally charged disaster. Students sensed the white man’s discomfort the moment they walked into class. They had grown adept at spotting teachers who were there as a last resort and were hypersensitive about being judged by Beach High’s reputation or for their social and economic circumstances.

When the classroom cleared out, Bonnell hung a sign on the door that said “visiting artist.”

Much to his surprise, it didn’t discourage anyone from returning. In fact, even after failing to meet state academic progress standards for the seventh year in a row, Beach High students returned.

Some, he discovered, worked eight-hour shifts after school or were primary caregivers for ailing siblings. But they were in their seats the next morning. After every personal and community pitfall, and through all the unflattering media coverage, Beach High students kept coming.

When community issues with crime, drugs and poverty filtered onto campus and when disillusioned district officials stripped away principals and programs, the students refused to give up on Beach High.

Their hope and resolve moved Bonnel. He started to look at his students and his responsibilities differently.

He took his creative license even further and drafted a letter on authentic-looking Obama ’08 campaign letterhead. The artistic forgery encouraged Beach High students to break through barriers and pursue academic excellence.

Bonnell removed his visiting artist sign, replaced it with the Obama forgery and decided to adopt the Beach High spirit. He was determined to make an academic difference.

“For two years, I fell flat on my face, but I kept trying,” he said.

Turnaround

Though determined, Beach High seemed stuck in a cycle of inspirational breakthroughs and frustrating setbacks. Each time test scores rose, the graduation rate dipped, or vice versa.

No matter how hard they worked, they seemed perpetually trapped on academia’s dreaded No Child Left Behind Act Needs Improvement List. It was a particularly sore spot for Savannah-Chatham Superintendent Thomas Lockamy, who was hired to reform local schools.

He had handpicked a principal who brought Beach close to its mandated achievement goals, but never close enough.

“I’ll never forget,” Lockamy said. “I met with the Beach High student government and they asked me, ‘Why are you allowing our school to fail? We want a good reputation, and we need your help.’”

One sweltering day in 2009, Lockamy arrived on campus with a team of central office officials.

The anxious faculty was organizing study sessions and tutorials in preparation for another round of state testing. Lockamy gathered them into groups and announced he had a radical plan for pulling Beach out of its academic slump.

Beach would be among the first schools in the nation to receive a three-year, $6 million Obama administration grant to turn around academic outcomes. Beach High would get resources for all of the research-based teaching methods. They would receive intensive training and even bonuses for sticking with Beach High and meeting goals.

But there was a catch. For Beach High to get a fresh start from the radical new Turnaround Grant, they would have to clean house.

At least half of the existing Beach High faculty and staff would have to be replaced.

Making it happen

The Obama administration’s turnaround model for academic reform was designed to achieve immediate results, and although they knew it wouldn’t be an easy process, Savannah-Chatham school officials felt Beach High had waited long enough.

“The turnaround model is extremely aggressive. Less than 1 percent of schools and districts across the country are implementing it,” said Aretha Rone-Bush, the Savannah-Chatham executive director who wrote Beach High’s turnaround grant proposal. “It’s hard work, but it’s the most progressive model out there and if done correctly, change will happen.”

The turnaround plan was simple: Do what research says works. Create an atmosphere where enthusiastic and optimistic faculty receive the support, training and data they need to keep students excited about achievement.

But the key to success was finding a dynamic leader who could make it happen. Although they conducted a national search, Lockamy decided a popular homegrown principal was the perfect person for the job.

“When you show a child that you believe in him, you can change the climate of a school,” Lockamy said. “We hired people who believed in our children, no matter what the challenge. Failure was not an option.”

Derrick Muhammad had achieved success as principal of Johnson High and charmed the public as leader of the Woodville-Tompkins Career and Technical Education Training Center. But neither program had the deep-rooted social and academic issues Beach was grappling with.

Every academic program Muhammad had headed had been a winner. This time, Muhammad was way outside his comfort zone.

First-year change

Change is difficult, and Muhammad had just three years to make it happen.

He rehired just 13 of the most enthusiastic and innovative members of the previous faculty. Bonnell was among them.

Then Muhammad set out to gain the trust and support of the skeptical Beach High student body by being candid. He told them where they were academically and where they needed to be when the turnaround money ran out.

“I just laid it out there for them to see. The state was dead serious. Our outcomes were at the rock-bottom,” he said. “This was our last opportunity to turn things around, and we had to do it fast.”

The bulk of their energy was focused on meeting state academic progress goals.

“We needed to show ourselves and the community that it could be done,” Muhammad said.

Bonnell’s contribution was the Beach Project — an academic and behavioral motivation tool he developed based on best teaching practices.

With the help of grants and donations totaling more than $10,000 a year, Bonnell was able to award academic and behavioral excellence with play money called Beach Bucks. He even set up a program for them to manage their Beach Buck accounts and invest online.

Students with enough Beach Bucks could purchase major prizes, such as flat-screen televisions, iPads and Samsung tablets. It wasn’t long before Bonnell’s students could name more than 50 major artists and 75 specific works of art by medium and genre.

Muhammad expanded the program school-wide. It wasn’t long before every student found a motivation to succeed. And through long hours of remediation, data analysis and weekend tutorials, they did it.

For the first time in the history of the No Child Left Behind Act, Beach High School had passed enough Georgia high school graduation tests and gotten enough students to stick it through to graduation to make adequate yearly progress.

Second-year success

When Travaris Holmes moved from Windsor Forest High on Savannah’s southside to Beach on the westside for his sophomore year, he didn’t believe reports about Beach High’s progress until he got there.

“I had no idea school could be this good,” he said. “There are so many opportunities for you to learn and experience new things. When I came here, I had never traveled out of Georgia. Last week, I went to an academic conference in Chicago. It makes me think there are so many more things I can do because there is so much more out there for me.”

But the second year of Beach High’s school improvement grant was completely different than the first. Georgia changed its academic progress standards.

Instead of determining progress by outcomes on graduation tests, officials began looking at end-of-course test scores.

That meant academic focus couldn’t just be concentrated on the small group of graduation test-takers. Beach had to raise the bar on academic outcomes in every subject area on every grade level.

Classroom instruction was closely monitored, teachers worked closely with teacher coaches and received regular feedback on improving effectiveness.

Students took weekly benchmark tests and were grouped by areas of academic need. The result was record-high success.

Math II end-of-course test pass rates were above the state average. Economics and U.S. history pass rates were above the district average. Beach was the only local high school to improve its pass rates on all nine end-of-course tests administered that year. Beach had finally worked its way up in academic rankings.

Third-year charm

Meeting academic benchmarks didn’t get any easier in the third and final year of the grant, but Beach High pulled it off.

“We had all of these different variables, and we had to adjust and adapt,” Muhammad said. “We were always on pins and needles.”

Savannah-Chatham schools abandoned block scheduling for a traditional high school schedule, and the adjustment was huge for Beach.

Instead of taking four 90-minute classes each semester, they had to figure out how to divide teaching and learning into seven 55-minute classes throughout the year. It was also the year that Georgia implemented its academic progress system, called the Georgia College and Career Ready Performance Index.

Schools were issued scores for 2012 based on end-of-course test scores and a new, less forgiving method for calculating graduation rates.

Getting large numbers of at-risk freshman to graduation day in four years had never been an easy task for Beach. Yet Beach earned the maximum points for closing the achievement gap, exceeded the state average for Georgia’s other turnaround and transformation grant schools and was just shy of the state’s overall average of 72.6. It was a remarkable feat for a school that was in Georgia’s bottom 10 percent just three years ago.

“Our 2013 score will definitely be even better,” Muhammad said. “We could have had more students passing AP exams and scoring higher on the SAT. We left some points on the table. That won’t happen again.”

Of that, everyone at Beach is confident. Next year, when turnaround grant funds run out, they’ll start classes in a new education sales tax-funded building and use their training and existing federal funding supplements to carry on the good work they’ve started.

What they’ve accomplished so far has made Beach a model for turnaround implementation.

Their efforts have been recognized by the National Conference for Education of Black Children, the National Institute for School Turnaround, the Georgia Department of Education Race to the Top office and the Georgia Department of Education Office of School Improvement.

Beach has moved full circle from where it was when Bonnell painted the motivational Obama mural on the dingy hallway a few years ago. He and his students began work on a new Obama portrait when they realized the mural would be destroyed this summer during the demolition of the old Beach High facility.

It prompted Bonnell to write the president and tell him how his election inspired the campus and his turnaround grant changed their culture and outcomes. On April 3, Obama wrote back — this time for real.

“Your generation will be tomorrow’s leaders, and you inspire me and give me tremendous hope for the future,” the president wrote.

Beach High officials are making copies for each student to take with them when they start school afresh next year.